About Jacob Lunow
Jacob Lunow has lived in the foothills of western North Carolina for nearly 30 years. Spending his early childhood on reclaimed farmland in Burke County, which he feels helped develop his relationship with the natural world, he and his family later moved to Hickory, where he attended school. After attaining an Anthropology degree at UNC Chapel Hill, he returned to Hickory to work as an architectural draftsman. Later suffering a stroke at the young age of 31, in which his speech and movement were severely limited, he turned to the camera lens to express himself by capturing the inherent beauty and sadness displayed in the naturally decaying landscape of his childhood. These photographs tell a narrative not just of the human world left untended, but of the powerful forces of nature that are ceaseless in their endeavor to reclaim the land.
About His Photography
Having begun on film, Jacob started to explore the world of digital photography in 2004 and since then he has undertaken to “relearn” the process of developing photographs within the new digital darkroom through classes, workshops and intensive study. In 2007 he was awarded a Regional Artist Project Grant from the North Carolina Arts Council that enabled him to purchase a Canon DSLR camera. He then took this camera and completed a three-week road trip through the mountains of Appalachia, which comprises his 2007 Appalachia series. After being awarded a second Regional Artist Project Grant in 2008 for the purpose of a obtaining an Ultrachrome k3 inkjet printer as well as funding another Appalachia photo trip, he headed off for the hills again to gather material that would become his 2008 Appalachia series, In February of 2009, he spent time traveling through rural eastern North Carolina’s farms, bogs and hamlets creating a visual record of his experience.
He has developed this online portfolio out of these trips, but he has also included his earlier work from shooting black and white film during a summer spent in Chapel Hill, as well as his initial digital images from 2005-2006, which were shot mostly around Hickory and the family land in Burke County while he was recovering from the worst of the stroke.
Artist Statement
The sterility of our manufactured landscapes is imposing, but it is only a veneer. It is a botox we use to ward off the appearance of the natural process of aging, and like botox, the façade of a permanent dominance over nature in our constructed environment must be perpetually maintained. Its pathology dictates the obliteration of all but the most subservient of shrubberies in our landscapes, and even those must be shackled into place with mulch ring leg-irons. When we are confronted with this imposed order, we are forced to accept ourselves as geoscape imperialists, but in truth, we are only occupiers. Perhaps that is why we delight in the beauty of decay. It reminds us that our footprint as humans is not permanent. The modern “maintenance-free” world of plastic and concrete, however, does not decay. It breaks and is discarded, while the impermanence of an old farm house is shown when it does not attempt to thwart nature, but to return to it.